Wait, are you thinking this through carefully? Because your mitigating issue for golf courses, that they also use way more land, makes them worse, not better.

Agreed, golf courses and data centers need to be regulated and limited. Though data centers seem to use much more water per acre than golf courses. The number I pulled in the original post was global golf course water consumption not just the US. Golf courses also use 7x more pesticides than agricultural land. On the other hand data centers that try to do "closed loop" systems rely on heavy use of anti-freeze, anti-fungals, and anti-corrosives which eventually leads to a toxic sludge that is a massive problem to deal with. Especially since they build up with PFAS as well.

Both are massive environmental problems and the economic externalities have not been accounted for.

Again: using more acreage makes golf courses worse.

I don't understand what you're trying to say and I think you might be very confused. Data centers use more water per acre.

If we had the exact same number of acres of golf courses and data centers, data centers would use more water.

That's the point: we won't have the same number of acres of golf courses and data centers. Golf courses intrinsically use more land.

I'm not sure that follows from the GP's numbers. The average data center size seems to be around 120,000 sqft ~ 3 acre. That means data centers also occupy between 1 and 2.5 million acres of land.